10 Frustrating Movies That Went Nowhere

4. Southland Tales

Somewhere along the line, you have to admire Richard Kelly for trying to do something "big" for his follow-up to the brilliant indie flick Donnie Darko... and at the same time, you want to slap him in the face and ask why he tried to do so freakin' much in one movie. Because Southland Tales, without a doubt one of the most curious failures in cinematic history, is an unbridled mess - a picture that attempts to deal with so many themes, subjects and topics, that the final film fails to offer up anything engaging about absolutely any of them. It's a work of misguided insanity.

Is there another movie in existence that skims over so many ideas and questions and still manages to go absolutely nowhere at all? The plot, way too convoluted to describe here, finds itself set in a futuristic Los Angeles rendered with an overtly satirical edge. Kelly seems to have written Southland Tales as if he were recently diagnosed with a terminal illness; everything in his brain goes into the melting pot that is this relentlessly painful allegory for nothingness - musical numbers, random political discourse, gun turrets (?). 144 minutes long, and yet... zip.